Competitive pressures are forcing organizations to integrate and automate their business operations, such as order processing, procurement, claims processing, and administrative procedures. As a result, process design, automation, and management technologies are being used in both traditional and newly-formed, Internet-based enterprises in order to improve the quality and efficiency of their administrative and production processes, to manage electronic commerce (or e-commerce) transactions, and to rapidly and reliably deliver services to businesses and individual customers.
Electronic business (or e-business) is implemented by business processes that enable information to be accessed, updated and communicated in a purely digital format. E-business is transforming corporations, markets, and the global economy. The conduct of business over Internet (e.g., buying, selling, servicing customers and collaborating with business partners) is affecting how business transactions are performed. For example, web services allow customers to easily find products, services, providers and suppliers that they need, compare prices and qualities, and trade, buy, and get products and services delivered quickly. Customers may be presented with user-friendly graphical interfaces, targeted advertisements, up-to-date product catalogues, and personalized stores. The web facade, however, hides inefficiencies, manual and error-prone operations, and slow, complex, inflexible, and unmanageable systems. Indeed, in many e-business applications, the execution of business processes involves a substantial amount of human intervention in several aspects of business process execution, such as (repeated) data entry, process execution monitoring (a process that often requires tracking each process over several systems in order to find out its current advancement state), exception handling, and scheduling of process activities.
Inefficiencies in e-business processes impose high operating costs that are strongly affecting the profits of many e-business entities. To compete successfully, enterprises are demanding effective ways to implement e-business and deliver e-services over the Internet. In order to attract and retain customers as well as business partners, organizations also need to provide their services (i.e., execute their processes) with a high, consistent, and predictable quality. In general, in order to deliver such quality, business processes should be designed correctly, their execution should be supported by a system that can meet workload requirements, and the (human or automated) process resources should be able to perform their work items in a timely fashion.